


Encounter

by theLiterator



Series: Barry works for the SCPD/Reverse Timeline AU [1]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, First Meetings, First Time, Identity Reveal, M/M, One Night Stands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-18
Updated: 2015-10-18
Packaged: 2018-04-27 02:10:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5029633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theLiterator/pseuds/theLiterator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Barry Allen left Central City after he screwed everything up, picking up a life in Starling City where he doesn't try to save the world, he just runs forensics.</p><p>Oliver Queen just got rescued after spending 5 years on a desert island, and he's got a chip on his shoulder and an image to maintain.</p><p>Barry Allen isn't stupid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Encounter

**Author's Note:**

> For Day One of Olivarry Week 2015 on tumblr: Barry working for the SCPD.

So, the club wasn’t really Barry’s idea of a good time; too much going on, too many opportunities for something to go wrong and for him to use his superspeed, despite having sworn off using it. But when Detective Lance had snarled that just because _he_ wasn’t happy didn’t mean that his people needed to stay and watch him break things, and Laurel Lance had snagged him and said, “I need a date for Oliver Queen’s homecoming party, and you’d piss him off more than anyone else I’ve run into today,” well.

Who was he to argue with circumstances?

He’d long since lost track of Laurel, she’d run into an old fling or something and they’d disappeared together, probably to rekindle the flame, but the drinks were free and he had literally nowhere better to be. This was certainly more enjoyable than ignoring Iris’s phone calls and reminding himself over and over why the Flash was a terrible thing for a city to endure while he watched the news.

“Whoa, hey,” some guy said, colliding with him from behind. His hands slid down to Barry’s hips, and somewhere someone broke a glass to a chorus of shrieking. “Wanna dance?” the guy asked, already grinding up against Barry in time to the pulsing bass.

Another guy was glaring at them from across the room, and Barry wasn’t sure if he was meant to be making someone’s boyfriend jealous, but while the guy was big and kind of scary, Barry was pretty sure he'd taken on worse and won, so he just winked at him.

Barry laughed and spun in the man’s grip, smile becoming forced when he realized that _Oliver Queen himself_ was the one manhandling him, and then he thought, _why not_? and his grin returned immediately.

Oliver laughed, fingers flexing against Barry’s hips before his hands slipped back to cup his ass. Barry leaned in close, and Oliver smelled strongly of tequila and fresh sweat.

Oliver’s laugh never really stopped, and he bent and kissed Barry, sloppy and wet, a drunken let’s-take-this-somewhere-else sort of kiss, except that his eyes were completely focused, with a cold calculation to them that Barry decided to ignore.

He wasn’t drunk either, but he sure as hell was planning on pretending to be.

“You got a place, pretty boy?” Oliver asked, slurring his speech.

“Last I checked, you had like fifty,” Barry said, laughing nervously and hoping it came across as carefree. He hadn’t hooked up with _anyone_ since Linda, after all, and that hadn’t gone well, but maybe with a dude, and with the control he’d learned from…from _Thawne_ , he’d be okay.

And what the hell, he could always run away.

***

Somehow, they ended up at Barry’s place, and Barry was too busy fighting with clothes and the desire to speed things up to really analyze Oliver’s motives in insisting they go to his shitty walkup in the Glades instead of literally every other option he was pretty sure was available to them.

Oliver’s hand snapped tight around his wrist when Barry reached for the hem of his undershirt, and Barry stared up at him. He wasn’t even trying to push the illusion of drunkenness now; there was something like fear flattening his expression, so Barry carefully pulled back, hands up.

Probably shitty scars from living on a shitty island for five years, he figured, and hey, the guy was entitled to his secrets.

“You want _me_ naked?” he asked, smiling a little to show that he wasn’t going to push it (and what kind of awful person would he be if he did? He had his own secrets, after all.)

“Sure,” Oliver said, licking his lips and swallowing hard. “Yeah. Please.”

“Cool,” Barry said, maybe moving a little faster than he should to skin off his jeans and boxers while Oliver fought with the buttons on his shirt.

Oliver’s hands were rough with callouses, and Barry wanted to pick them up and analyze them, except that Oliver was a good time, not a crime scene, so he kissed him instead, fingers lightly brushing the waistband of his boxers, a question he wasn’t sure how to ask aloud.

Oliver was the one who broke them apart to strip those off, and his smile was nervous and rueful, but his eyes were still cold. Barry grinned and traced the perfectly defined line of his iliac crest down to a gorgeous cock that was definitely into Barry, even if Oliver’s upstairs brain was a million miles away.

Besides, Barry knew a great way to fix that.

Oliver made a strangled noise that he quickly muffled against a fist, and reached for Barry’s hair with his free hand, cupping the back of his head and rubbing little circles with his thumb.

Barry hadn’t really done anything with a guy in years, but he’d always had a good memory for things, and the way Oliver reacted to his mouth seems generally positive, right up until he used the hand on Barry’s head to pull him back and encourage him to get back to his feet.

“I was hoping,” Oliver said, flushed and breathing too hard, “To at least make it to a bed. It will be the first time I've had sex in one in five years, after all,” his grin was a little lopsided and it made Barry’s gut ache to think about that, so he just nodded and steered them both to his bedroom.

The sheets were rumpled, but Barry had done laundry over the weekend, so he wasn’t too worried about it, and anyway, Oliver didn’t seem to care, though he did draw back the cover so the bed was completely exposed before he tumbled Barry down into it, following after him and biting into a filthy kiss that made Barry arch up and whine, keeping a tight hold on his speed.

Somehow, with Oliver, or maybe just with a stranger in general, it was easier to do, although he probably should do something about the way he kept rutting up against Oliver’s leg like he was desperate for it.

He couldn’t quite manage to stop, and besides, Oliver seemed to like it, if the fact that he brought a hand down between them to wrap around Barry’s cock was any indication. 

He moved his kisses down along Barry’s jaw, sucking bruises into his skin while he made careful work of the two of them, bringing Barry off with a spectacular suddenness that he hadn’t had to endure since high school.

“Thanks,” Barry mumbled, after, and Oliver laughed at him, a soft little huff of noise that seemed absolutely nothing like the laughter from the party. “Wait, hang on, let me.”

“I came before you did,” Oliver said, rolling them to the other side of Barry’s bed, and he was really extremely strong for a rich guy, Barry thought. “You’ve got a very sweet mouth.”

“You’ve got an amazing amount of self-control then,” Barry said, catching one of his hands up so he could stare at the scars and the callouses and the musculature. “Since I didn’t even notice.”

Oliver rearranged himself on the bed and then used the hand Barry’d stolen to tug him up on his chest. Barry adjusted so his arm wouldn’t fall asleep before the rest of him did and used a toe to hook the sheets up within grabbing distance.

Instead of calling Oliver a liar, he just patted the sheet securely in place over them. “You want a round two, you let me know,” he said. “I’ve got to get up for work at seven though, so my alarm is going to be sucktastic.”

“I’ve had worse,” Oliver said, and Barry mumbled something that may have been agreement, even as he brushed the tips of his fingers across the scarred, rough tips of Oliver’s.

***

“Sorry,” Oliver whispered when he got up a few hours later, brushing a kiss to Barry’s temple that seemed decidedly un-casual. “I shouldn’t have stayed this long, though.”

Barry blinked and tried to clear the muzziness of sleep from his brain. “Call me, if you want another round or whatever. I mean, I get that this doesn’t make us boyfriends, you don’t need to have your lawyers send me a strongly worded letter and a restraining order, I just was thinking--which I really should never do, it’s always trouble--that maybe if you wanted someone who didn’t… uh. Like. Have expectations? Only now I’m making it sound like I do, but I really don’t. I mean.”

He shook his head and Oliver was staring at him, expression completely unreadable in the half-light from the streets. “I mean I’m from Central City, and I honestly had no idea you even existed until like, three days ago, or whatever.”

“Only three?” Oliver asked, sounding amused. “But I’ve been back a week.”

“Yeah,” Barry said, scrubbing his hands over his face. “They made fun of me the _entire_ time I was going over the crime scene.”

“The crime scene,” Oliver repeated.

“Oh. Right. Uh. My name is Barry Allen, and I work for the SCPD crime lab? Pleased to. Uh. Meet you?”

Oliver shook his head. “I _really_ need to go.”

Barry nodded, but then grabbed the notebook and pen he kept in his nightstand, scribbling down his name and number so he could tear off the sheet and hand it over.

“Seriously. Call me. Or don’t. No strings. Scout’s honor.”

“Of course you were a Boy Scout,” Oliver said, laughing that little huff of laughter again and shaking his head. “Goodbye, Barry Allen.”

“Bye.” Barry said, fidgeting with the sheets and waiting for Oliver’s footsteps to stop echoing from the hall before he got up to lock the deadbolt.

 _Real smooth, Barry_ , he thought, sighing.

***

Oliver didn’t call him.

In fact, the next time Barry saw him, it was when he was trying to keep his head down in the conference room at the SCPD while everyone else around him kept getting louder and angrier in their discussion of whether the gunman and the Hood were the same man.

(They weren't, Barry knew. He knew it from the science, and he knew it from gut instinct because there was not a chance in _hell_ the Hood would use curare on any of his projectiles. It wasn't clean, and the Hood killed clean, when he killed, and even when he didn’t, the torture ws rarely that. Barry'd seen torture; he’d know.)

“Hey,” Oliver Queen said, knocking on the doorframe. “Uh, normally I wouldn’t interrupt, but there’s at least two reporters out in the bullpen and you’re getting loud enough to hear clearly.”

Barry snapped his gaze up to the other man, and then immediately down to his hands, remembering the taste and texture of his callouses, and his lips parted for half a second before he could control the reaction. Oliver wasn't even looking at him, and no one else could possibly make the sort of intuitive leap Barry just had, not without having decided, on a whim, three weeks ago, to memorize his hands.

Detective Lance took the opportunity to start yelling at _Oliver_ instead, and everyone else escaped through the other door, while Barry lingered, waiting for Detective Lance to realize they still had an audience and get flustered and leave, which Oliver facilitated by brushing around the other man to grab Barry’s hand.

“Barry,” Oliver said warmly. “I meant to call.” His smile was wide and flirtatious, inviting Barry to grin back even though it didn’t reach the other man's eyes.

“Oliver,” he replied with as much simpering soap opera lust as he could fake. Oliver blinked.

Detective Lance said “Oh for the love of-- You’re disgusting, Oliver. I hope you know that, Barry. He’s probably cheating on you with five other people.” He stormed out and Barry made a face at his back.

Oliver raised an eyebrow.

“He _really_ doesn’t like you. It’s kind of scary, actually. Like, I’m afraid he’ll give himself ulcers like this.”

“He has good reasons,” Oliver said. 

Barry rolled his eyes. “Oh, we’ve _all_ heard them; he likes to get into screaming fights with Laurel and doesn’t seem to realize how thin these walls are. His reasons are objectively stupid.”

“I can’t talk about that with you,” Oliver said flatly, and Barry shrugged. Fair.

“You should consider talking about it with _him_ ,” he said. “Not, uh, that it’s any of my business? And I really don’t have any room to talk, I mean, I left Central City because of how much I didn’t want to talk about. You know. Dead people. So.” He shrugged and shut up, realizing he’d said way more than he’d meant to.

“Well,” Oliver said. “It was nice seeing you.”

“Actually,” Barry said. “We should talk.”

Oliver shook his head. “Don’t make me have my lawyers write that letter,” he said, tone much colder than Barry would have expected, if he hadn’t just realized they guy’s fingertips had bowstring callouses on them.

“No,” Barry said. “Not about that. I think we have a lot more in common than we realized, is all.”

Oliver shook his head. “We really don’t, CSI-guy.”

Barry shook his head and grabbed Oliver in the space between two heartbeats, whisking them up to the roof so they could finish the conversation properly.

“We really do, Hood-guy,” Barry said.

Oliver was gaping, mouth open and everything.

“Right. Uh. So, my name is Barry Allen, and I’m the fastest man alive.” He grinned and offered Oliver his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Starling City Vigilante.”


End file.
